


Lost Boy

by minyrrds



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, but i promise it'll get better soon, korean!andrew, korean!renee, p r o m i s e, poc!foxes, references to andrew's past, references to non-con situations, references to past trama, sorry yo there's just a lot of angst rn, there's probs gonna be a slow buildup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 06:57:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6601234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minyrrds/pseuds/minyrrds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andrew grew up knowing Korean, a small secret part of him that was never stained by the world, and it slowly spills out into the rest of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost Boy

**Author's Note:**

> WOW [THIS HEADCANON](http://andrewminyards.co.vu/post/142990976144/so-ive-been-talking-abt-this-w-deuxfolie-for) GOT OUT OF HAND.  
> thanks to [maddiy](http://drunk-onbooks.tumblr.com) and [irene](http://deuxfoile.tumblr.com) for fleshing this out with me and crying abt the pain that this has caused.

When Neil had asked Andrew what he remembered from his childhood, Andrew wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t recall much that was some shade of pleasant.

What happy things he did remember was something he never spoke about with anyone, not Bee, not Renee when she had asked, gently in Korean during one of their walks after he had known her for a year, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to give it up to a boy wrapped in his own lies that finding his truths was like pulling apart spun thread. There were moments before the world had become cold and hard and he felt like his only release was the things he could do to himself, there was other things he could grasp onto, and those were the memories he had clung to the most before he came to Palmetto (and even sometimes in his worst moments, he would retreat to the roof and remind himself of the soft feelings between his tongue and teeth as he repeated conjugations and vocabulary to himself to keep his mind off the chaos bubbling in the building below his feet).

 

When Andrew was three, his second foster home had started to teach him Korean. He didn’t know then what he knew now, that small kids were always kept the longest (especially ones with sweet round faces and curling dimples in their cheeks when they giggled with joy). He didn’t know that he was a “test kid” for the couple, trying to get pregnant themselves but hoping to try out their ability to teach Hangul to a small blonde half-Korean boy with remarkable hazel eyes bouncing his way through the system with no end in sight. They wanted their own flesh and blood child, a boy just like Andrew, but they were worried about not being able to properly convey their culture now that they were so far removed from it, so Andrew was their only hope.

He’d practice his letters, learning Hanja and Hangul every day with his patient foster mother, the unfamiliar sounds first tripping off clumsily from his tongue, getting mixed up with the small amounts of English he learned in between lessons (his guardians weren’t so cruel as to completely neglect teaching the language that would become predominant in his life, but it was never their top priority). As the weeks passed he moved on to harder vocabulary, harder conjugations. He practiced every moment he could, not wanting to disappoint his new possible parents, not wanting to move again (at the back of his mind, Andrew was always aware this wouldn’t be his last stop, but his sfour year old heart couldn’t help but trust and want and hope).

When he was four and a half, his new family moved away and he was sent to a new house with new rules and no more Korean lessons in the afternoon and stories about _Janghwa Hongryeon jeon_ and _Hungbu and Nolbu_ before bed. His new foster mother read him stories about Cinderella and her Prince Charming before bed, Western fairy tales that he had never heard before (at night before he fell asleep, he would translate them for himself into Korean so that he could understand them better, but never when his new family was around). This couple also had no other children, but their motives for fostering Andrew were vastly different from his last family. In the afternoons, instead of vocabulary quizzes and new verbs to learn, he helped his new mother scrub the kitchen floor. In the mornings he learned to cook breakfast and tiptoe around the house (silent as the grave) so that he wouldn’t wake his new father before he was ready to leave for work. He would hide in his room and tried his best to remain invisible. As the months passed, the cleaning took over more and more, and the stories went away (he still had his old books with the familiar characters and his favourite stories splashed across the pages in fading color that he read to himself buy the streetlight that spilled in from his window on the nights where he felt particularly lonely).

When he was one month shy of six years old, he moved again. This house was the shortest stay out of all of them, from the moment he stepped into the hallway the racist taunts began and Andrew had his first taste of true hurt (he never trusted them, right from the very beginning).

The third house wasn’t as bad, but it reminded him too much of the second. No stories, lots of cleaning, and mainly trying not to disturb his new foster guardian (it was around here when Andrew unconsciously stopped privately referring to them as parents and more as guardians). A month in, the last woman who would resemble anything like a mother to him for a long while began teaching him German during the day while her husband was out and slowly but surely he picked up the language (one harsh sound at a time). It was entirely unlike Korean which still came off his tongue is careful ways, or the English he spoke without thinking. He formed is words with cautious phrasing, and hope for the dazzling smile that lit up her face whenever his grammar was correct or he mastered a new verb (but he walked a tentative rope and convinced himself that if he learned his German well enough, if he made his new mother happy enough, if he tried hard enough, he could stay). One morning he made the grave mistake of shattering a plate on the kitchen floor while he was preparing breakfast and his new guardian beat him black and blue (he didn’t stay for very long after that).

 

Andrew tries his hardest to forget the time between when he turned seven and when he went to juvie when he was thirteen.

(He remembers bruises and bleeding, feeling like he was being ripped open from the inside out. He remembers raised scars and the first time he held a blade to the soft pale skin of his arm, the way he didn’t expect to bleed so much after. The verbs and words he would repeat under his breath while he would wait for it to just be _over_. Eventually moving from conjugations which were too hard to focus on in the worst moments to just spelling out words over and over and over until the sounds turned into as steady stream of buzzing low in his ears that meant at least that he wasn’t screaming anymore. He remembers saying please in every language he knew and it still not being enough. It was never enough.)

He tries, but sometimes his memory betrays him.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title from "Angels & Airwaves" by Angel Haze
> 
> Drop by [on tumblr](http://tooruoikawa.co.vu) to say hi and cry about angry smols.


End file.
